THE NEW YORKER lng at nowhere. There wa,; a mile or so by buggy to the homestead; then, in the morning, I would wake In my cousin's old bed, to the sound of a million sheep and magpIes. The homestead, Gracelands, stood in the middle of I don't know how many thousand acres of sheep run. A sprawling jumble of buildIngs lay ahout it. Apart from the sheep, there were about thirty horses, a dozen dogs, a cow or two, and a vast proletariat of chick- ens. It was not at all like those stream- lined American farms that look so neat photographed from the air, and I found it confusing, although there was no doubt in my mInd who ruled the huge roost The lord of man and brute was my Great-Uncle Hugh McInstrie, and I was very scared of him. He represented power and authority. He bellowed at his immigrant hands, housed them in huts papered with old newspapers, and made them heartily regret that they had left the intimate and familiar misery of a London slum or a Durham mine vil- lage. I think now there was no delIb- erate harshness in this; it was simply a product of the profound conviction that those who do not own land cannot ex- pect to be happy in this life. Bearded and mounted on one of his seventeen- hand hacks, Uncle H ugh was a patri- archal figure; at seventy he had a "back" like a trooper of the Victorian Mounted Police, who,;e black helmets, carbines, bandoleers, "concertina" boots with white whipcord tights, and gra} horses contributed a somewhat menac- ing ceremony to civic processions. The association was fixed in my mind by a verse in "Waltzing Matilda," the na- tional song, that recounts the fatal con- sequences of stealing sheep: DowI1 came the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred, Down came the troopers, One! Two! Th ree ! On an aged, big-barrelled pony, a relic of my Cousin Rob's childhood, I tooled along behind this personage, chafed at my bare knees, bursting with chatter and not daring to open my little gob. One visit, when I was twelve, I remember in particular, because of an experience with some crows. It was a dry year in a dry land. The thin trees shed theIr bark like snake- skin; the grass was brown and did not fully cover the hard brown earth. The plain was the color of a mangy brindled greyhound, and over it the sheep moved Uke lice. From time to time, the vigilant old master shepherd would see something untoward; it was lambing tIme, and there had been frosts, mild but enough to cramp the peristaltic .;>":>0 -. , I " · 1 \ . ", :> l' I \ " , , ,v I' ,,' ) '\Ii \ .l , 39 ^, t'<<Y>> ^ ', ,y ; ; . ;' < f/'" " ! .. " . l I "." Ï;:: , '" ",' , ,', ::: , , ' ,0, "-\ :.l .Q 4- " (.). a; 1'í 40 ......... À,.rIP" .............. ..,. '.,j "W hat do you mean you're not interested? You sent for our free booklet, didn't you?" . movements of birth, so that here and there the legs or the head of a half-born lamb protruded from the hinder parts of a distressed ewe Deft yet perfunc- tory, Uncle Hugh went among the lambing mob, a mounted midwife. Now and then a ewe would flee In panic from her deliverer; it was my role to dis- mount and run down this recalcitrant mother-a disconcerting task, because sometimes the face of the unborn lamb stared back reproachfully, It seemed to me, as I sprinted in its wake. Uncle Hugh would say nothing except to bark at the ragtaggle of dogs, but every now and then a heroic belch, a detonatIon like a threepenny firecracker, would is- sue frum the thickets of his beard. He was tÎ1e victim of some corrosive kind of Indigestion. As he rode, he sWIgged a solution of bakIng soda from a silver . flask; as far as I could hear, it did noth- ing to dampen the fires within. In addItion to this, as a sort of base fuel dump, a big gazogene of soda wa- ter stood perpetually on the south side of the veranda at Gracelands.. This en- gine, about the size and shape of an old- fashioned, wasp-waisted dressmaker's form, it was the business of my Cousin Ish bel-the practical one-to fill. This she dId with some trepidation. The device generated its own gas-carbon dioxide, I suppose-from the action of chemicals, and it needed strong nerves and light fingers to get the top screwed on before pressure built up", Once or twice, she was too late; the metal top whistled past her averted face like the warhead of a rocket, to bury Itself in the plasterboard ceiling of the kitchen. Whenever I helped myself to this